Cloning CentOS Guests - Disable MAC
Today I was scratching my head trying to figure out why my changes to the network to go from DHCP to static IP was not taking effect on my CentOS 7 guest. It turns out that the network configuration is defaulted to including the HWADDR (MAC) address as shown below:
# Generated by dracut initrd NAME="eth0" HWADDR=52:54:00:4D:24:AA ONBOOT=yes NETBOOT=yes UUID="dd66e666-87dc-4814-a862-61b8411c2c3d" IPV6INIT=yes BOOTPROTO=dhcp TYPE=Ethernet DEFROUTE=yes IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no IPV6_AUTOCONF=yes IPV6_DEFROUTE=yes IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL=no PEERDNS=yes PEERROUTES=yes IPV6_PEERDNS=yes IPV6_PEERROUTES=yes
When you clone a guest, the new guest is given a new MAC address but your network scripts will not be automatically updated. If your guests only have 1 NIC then you can just comment the HWADDR
line out and your guests will still work. Thus you can keep cloning without having to remember to update the MAC.
References
Last updated: 16th September 2021
First published: 16th August 2018
First published: 16th August 2018